Charos

Charos (pronounced /ˈtʃɑːroʊs/ or /ˈtʃɛəroʊs/) is the universe in the esture of Ses where terrestrial organisms are believed to have first evolved, and where most humans and other biotic folks still live. Many scholars believe that Charos was the only plane of Ses before Gomar the Ancient brought magic into the cosmos, and the gods emerged and other planes were created.

Charos consists of a vast plenum filled with multicolored transparent vapors called spacemist or dreammist. Floating in these mists, a great distance apart, are the rews, or worlddisks, where most of the plane's inhabitants live—great, flat, usually circular expanses of rock and earth and water. Though there are some exceptions, most of the rews line up along three orthogonal directions, perpendicular to the three so-called canonical axes: the Q axis, the G axis, and the H axis. The surfaces of the rews that share an orientation are collectively called conspects; because each rew has two surfaces, the three canonical axes give rise to six major conspects. Perpendicular to the Q axis are Qabede and Mriddiom; perpendicular to the G axis are Gaden and Ckapir; and perpendicular to the H axis are Gaiua and Heqhasta. The expanse between the rews is called dreamspace, and is mostly empty except for the dreammist. Visibility in dreamspace varies by the thickness of the mist, in some places extending several kilometers and in others only three or four meters.

While Charos is commonly believed to be infinite, this has not actually been proven, and some cosmologists believe it to be closed but finite. (A few have postulated that it may actually be open and bounded, though even among those who hold this maverick belief there is no consensus on the nature of the boundary, or what if anything might lie beyond it.) If Charos is finite, it is certainly immense; the lowest estimates for the number of rews run into the billions.

Etymology

The name of Charos comes from the plural form of the Calorran word "Charó", meaning "sky" or "plate". It is thus a reference both to the platelike rews that float in the plane as well as the misty skies above them. The associated adjective "Charotian" (/tʃɑːˈroʊʃən/ or /tʃɛˈroʊʃən/) does not, however, follow Calorran grammatical derivational rules, but is a regularized form constructed with the Latin-derived suffix -ian.

Dreamscapes

Scattered throughout Charos are volatile worldlets that measure no more than a few hundred meters across, and often much less, and usually last only a few minutes or hours before evanescing into nothingness. On these scrithel stages strange scenarios play out, often centered around and/or apparently tailored toward a single one of the world's fleeting inhabitants. Because of this and other factors, it is widely believed that these tiny worlds are representations of dreams, the central figure being a manifestation of the dreamer, and the caducous kingdoms are referred to as "dreamscapes"—or sometimes as "dreamdisks", though they are not always round in shape. It is these dreamscapes that give dreamspace its name, and which are partly responsible for the name of the esture of Ses, which means "world of dreams", although this also comes from the prevalence of dream magic.

While a dreamscape may appear almost anywhere within dreamspace, they rarely appear within sight of a rew, let alone on the rew's surface, or in its interior. Unless one has the misfortune to blunder directly into a dreamscape and interact with its ephemeral inhabitants, dreamscapes generally have little discernable effect on anything else except as a curiosity. However, it very occasionally happens that when the dream vanishes, some object or creature from the dream remains behind, having somehow attained a permanence not possessed by the dream that engendered it. These dream remnants are rare, and usually harmless, but in rare cases a dream may leave a remnant that is a dangerous monster—or a powerful telesm.

Rews

The discoidal rews that form the primary habitable surfaces in Charos vary in size, with a mean diameter of roughly twenty thousand kilometers and a standard deviation of around four thousand kilometers. (The distribution is not, of course, fully normal, since a rew cannot have a negative diameter.) A rew's thickness is usually about two or three percent of its diameter. Most rews are very close to perfectly circular in size, though irregular rews of other shapes do exist, the most mysterious of which are the brotoids, rare disks shaped roughly like human silhouettes, or rarely the silhouettes of other creatures.

The average distance from a rew to its nearest neighbor is several million kilometers. Here again, however, there is much variation, and some rews are much closer than that. It's even possible for two rews to actually touch. When two rews of the same orientation partly overlap, they are called layer rews; when two rews of the same or different orientation touch at their edges, they are called gear rews.

The spacemist in the immediate vicinity of the majority of rews has a different composition and appearance than that in the depths of dreamspace; this disparent envelope is known as the rew's atmosphere. While there are some more exotic rews with different atmospheres, on the majority of known rews, especially those that count humans among their native life, the atmosphere is made up mostly of air, a transparent and colorless gas. On most rews, there is a sharp discontinuity between the atmosphere and the colorful mists of dreamspace beyond; this boundary is called the dreamsea—a term often used in the plural when referring to the edges of the atmospheres of multiple worlds. Because of the slight differences in density and consistency between the atmosphere and dreamspace, it is possible for some materials to float on this interface, and there are some organisms—dream plankton—that are adapted to this environment, or that at least spend a part of their life cycle there. On some worlds, magical dreamships have been developed that can sail the dreamseas as conventional ships do on seas of water, floating in the mist with the surface of the world looming upside-down far overhead.

While dreamscapes seldom appear within a rew's atmosphere, they are for whatever reason more common just on the atmosphere's boundary, on the dreamseas, than anywhere else. They also interact in strange ways here; multiple dreamscapes may merge and combine into persistent glowing phantasmagoria, the exact contents of which change with their component dreams while the whole compound lingers despite the continual replacement of its parts. These fusions of dreamscapes are called stars, and they are often visible as dots of light from the rew below. Some stars are stationary, but more often the stars move over or around the rew below, in various patterns depending on the rew.

On most rews, some stars further combine into a very large star called a sun. For reasons that still aren't well understood, it's very rare for more than one sun to form near a given rew; rews with two or three suns exist, but are the exception to the rule. A rew's sun is usually its main light source, and the period of its orbit often defines the rew's day, with longer-term cycles of its motion perhaps also defining the world's year.

The stars and suns are not the only features of the dreamsea that can be seen from the nearby rew. The dreamseas of many worlds are also home to enormous, lingering storms that often are visible in the sky of the rew as circles or spots of various colors and patterns, and are known as moons. Another feature of the dreamseas that can sometimes be seen from the rew are knysts, gigantic portals leading to the dreamseas of other rews. These knysts are very useful to sailors on the dreamseas, as they provide the easiest means of traveling between different seas, and maps of knysts on certain seas, called waycharts, are valued tools to dreamsea navigators.

Skyfalls

Many rews have water all the way to their rims, and if there is nothing holding the water in place, it will plummet off the edge of the disk in a giant waterfall called a skyfall. The skyfall may continue below the disk for vast distances through dreamspace, staying together partly from cohesion and perhaps partly from the interplay of other forces, until finally impinging on another rew far below. It is, in fact, the incipient skyfalls that prevent a rew's water from being depleted by the outgoing skyfalls along its edge; the water lost off the edge of the rew is replaced by that coming from the skyfalls falling onto it. From the opposite surface of a rew, of course, the water of a skyfall will appear to be traveling upward; such an "upside-down" skyfall is known as a skyrise. Of course, a skyrise is not really a separate phenomenon from a skyfall; it is the same phenomenon seen from a different perspective.

Skyfalls often serve as useful landmarks and guides for travelers through dreamspace, who can follow a skyfall to more easily navigate a part of their route. This is not entirely without periclitation, however, as skyfalls provide habitats for creatures not found elsewhere in dreamspace, and staying near skyfalls does mean risking encounters with some potentially dangerous predators or parasites.

Some rare rews may have oceans of substances other than water, and if these oceans touch the edge of the rew they may produce skyfalls of these other materials. The Oleo, the cataract of oil that falls onto the rew of B'gor, is one example.

Other Features

While the rews are certainly the best known features of Charos, given that they're where most of its inhabitants live, there are other significant objects in deep space that most people will never encounter. One known to sailors on the dreamseas is the bell, a great bubble of air with no rew in the center. The origin of bells is a mystery, but their boundaries are usually connected by knysts to other dreamseas. Another enigmatic object of dreamspace is the crystal reef, a mass of jagged, branching arms of what is believed to be solidified spacemist, though the reasons why it hardens and why it takes on this particular form remain unclear. Yet another is the celestine, a great blob of glowing gelatinous matter around which the spacemists follow circular paths; on the rare occasions that a celestine occurs close enough to a rew to be visible from the surface, it is easily mistaken for a star. Also found in deep dreamspace are fleams, narrow channels of mist that are moving quickly relative to the surrounding spacemist, and nebulæ, clouds of dust far from any rew.

Life

Each conspect tends to bear its own characteristic types of panasteric life; the creatures of a particular conspect naturally will have their gravitational directions oriented toward the rew along the corresponding axis. Humans, for instance, are commonly found only on the conspect of Qabede, although the perpendicular conspect of Gaden has inhabitants called codmen that are very similar to humans except for their possession of long, prehensile tails. The dominant folk of Heqhasta, however, is a type of weird six-limbed, vaguely reptilian creature called a grazraith.

There are a few types of life that are present on multiple conspects. Occurring on both Qabede and Heqhasta, though curiously not with any frequency on any of the other four major conspects, are strange beings called Accursed that resemble other known creatures but are transparent and intangible. Found on all conspects are mistlings, vaporous entities that are thought to somehow form from the interaction of dream energy leaked from the rews with nearby dreammists. There are several known types of mistling, all of which feed on dream energy but in different manners—and with different levels of dangerous side effect. Also common to all conspects are paques, a strain of anek that is sensitive to certain quantities and bears some thelctic powers over one of its component creatures (called its gelf). Different conspects have different varieties of paque, usually combining creatures commonly found on that conspect, but paques of some sorts are found on all the major conspects.

While these types of creatures all may be the product of hapantics or phenomena that occur throughout the plane, explaining their ubiquity, there are other creatures whose presence on multiple conspects is harder to account for. These include the chathel, a creature something like a giant millipede; the gobbon, an amorphous thing that seems on close inspection to have biological features of fauna from all six major conspects; the narigat, a spidery beast with the ability to change the direction of its weight; and the bubble tree, the fragile fruit of which are as light as air.

Magic

The predominant form of magic in Charos, as in most of Ses, is dream magic, which draws upon some sort of numen that people gather in their dreams. Though some celemologists believe that dreamers somehow gather this dream energy from some other plane of Ses that they visit in their dreams, sufficiently different physical principles have been observed in dreams to lead most celemologists to the conclusion that the dreamers are visiting another esture entirely, which is sometimes called Goëtogenia.

However, there are many rews of Charos where dream magic doesn't function, and there is considerable evidence that, unlike the case of many hospers, dream magic is not something innate to the esture, but something that was brought into it later. Legend credits the bringing of magic to the world to the god Gomar the Ancient, and so the parts of Charos where dream magic is known are collectively known as Gomara, while the parts where it is not are called Aramog. Whether Gomara or Aramog is larger has not been determined, and some scholars theorize that they each make up exactly half the plane, though the arguments for this conclusion are less than rigorous.

While there is no other arcanum as widespread in Charos as dream magic, there are other arcana that are utilized on specific rews, or even on multiple rews, either in addition to dream magic, or, much more rarely, instead of it. Very few of these arcana, however, have significant influence outside of the world or handful of worlds where they apply. One that does is ostination, an arcanum specifically created in opposition to dream magic, and which not only does not rely on dreams, but keeps regular users of the arcanum from sleeping at all. Unfortunately, this seems to have some severe psychological side effects, and mad users of ostination, called Bisobai, sometimes descend upon rews and cause chaos.